


Dear Tokens of the Earth are They

by guardingdark



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Character Study, Episode: s07e06 The Snowmen, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-05
Updated: 2013-03-05
Packaged: 2017-12-04 10:45:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 540
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/709885
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/guardingdark/pseuds/guardingdark
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p></p><blockquote>
  <p>O, not in cruelty, not in wrath,<br/>The Reaper came that day;<br/>'Twas an angel visited the green earth,<br/>And took the flowers away.<br/></p>
</blockquote>—<i>The Reaper and the Flowers</i>, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
            </blockquote>





	Dear Tokens of the Earth are They

**Author's Note:**

> For [Macie](jemimawalkers.tumblr.com).

When he's 1300, he grows up, though he's not 1300, not really, and he doesn't so much grow up as grow hard.

(Was there a term for regression into something you'd never been?)

Amy had grown hard once, her skin turning to marble as she moved, stone joints cracking along impossible seams at her efforts to bend them. An illusion, though she couldn't have known; it had felt (and looked and smelled and sounded and tasted) real, certainly.

(Most hallucinations do.)

The mind is the bridge between the person and the world they inhabit. The mind controls everything, all thought and perception. Without the mind, the person and the world both _cannot_ exist.

In humanistic psychology (perhaps not shockingly a human creation, but applicable all the same) there is a man called Carl Ransom Rogers, born in 1902 in Oak Park, Illinois, died in 1987, seven states away, and he has never seen the stars. He believes that one's concept of themselves and their life experiences overlap to a certain degree, that the less they do the sadder they are.

The Doctor sees himself as a saviour, and experience shows him he is anything but.

(The Doctor sees himself as happy.)

Rogers is criticised for thousands of years into the future (until finally he is forgotten) for being too naïve, for believing that people are innately _good_. For believing that unconditional positive regard can solve nearly any problem.

"Unconditional positive regard."

Little Amelia Pond had held it for him, had believed in his _innate goodness_ , even when he left her, again and again and again.

(Rose and Ace and Sarah Jane and Jamie and Susan and so, so many more.)

And look at the Doctor now, with his waistcoat and his scowl and his pain.

He thought he could save them, but he was wrong, just like always, and what's the point even, any more, because the humans will all die anyway (at least they _have_ that escape), and what is it to him if they die ahead of schedule?

Ha! Look at him, a thousand-odd years after the Last War and not even a tenth of the time he's been renegade, and he's fallen in line, a little toy soldier for Rassilon millennia late.

Better late than never, even if there's no army to be a little toy soldier in, not anymore and never past.

(But his mind makes it real.)

"We're all stories in the end", he once and never and always told a little girl, a sad smile on his face, to be sure, but there was hope there, too, and there isn't any now.

(Somehow it's so much easier to be the one leaving than the other way 'round.)

"We're all stories in the end", and he's Sherlock Holmes (though not a very good one) because some insipid little human girl made a one-in-a-billion choice of words, but there's no such thing as coincidence, not for the Doctor.

Silly little Clara with her lies and her costumes and he sees himself in her, how could he not?

She can't die either, even when she does, and he's _interested_. Nothing's caught his interest in a hundred years, not since Manhattan.

(It's not quite hope, but it'll do.)


End file.
